On Friday 1 October there was a marketing event delivered by Facebook for University of Birmingham students. Kat Smith from the B-Enterprising team helped facilitate the event and shared her reaction to the event as it happened.
10.37am
It’s always exciting to be involved in a B-Enterprising
event and we’re proud to have worked with some big names. Today the atmosphere in The Exchange is
electric as we prepare to work another iconic brand in Facebook.
This afternoon, experts at Facebook will be holding an
interactive online session with students from the University of Birmingham and entrepreneurs
from our incubator at The Exchange. They
will learn how to use insights into consumer behaviour to create effective
adverts, and how to tailor adverts using consumer behaviour data.
Participants will have the opportunity to create their own
advert and get feedback from the Facebook pros.
Imagine how fantastic that will sound at a job interview:
‘Do you
have any digital marketing experience?’
‘Well,
yes, actually I learnt about digital marketing from the Facebook team.’
Over 250 people have signed up to join the session, making
it one of our most popular events to date.
12.08pm
The last-minute reminder email has just been sent and we are
nervous and excited. What if nobody
comes? What if we have tech issues? The pressure’s on to make a good first
impression because we want to work with Facebook as much as possible in future.
Unfortunately Facebook policies don’t allow us to record the
Zoom session and some people have told us they have lectures this afternoon. The reminder email was a good opportunity to
encourage people to attend for any part of the session that they can manage,
rather than miss out.
3.38pm
The Facebook event is live and running smoothly – we’ve
already learned that it takes our brains only 0.4 seconds to recognise an
image! We’re thinking about how websites use pixels to track consumer trends
and the importance of optimising images and webpages for mobile devices. It’s great to see such an interactive
session: the chat is on fire!
4.16pm
Taking a quick breather while the breakout room work is
underway. The Facebook facilitators have
clearly put a lot of effort into preparing today’s session and are now dashing
between the breakout rooms to support the group work – very impressive. Meanwhile the breakout groups are hard at work
creating their digital content so that the Facebook team can give some
feedback. The biggest challenge has been
meeting the different technical demands for PCs/laptops vs mobile devices.
4.40pm
Phew! From the
activity in the chat we can see that this has been a lively and useful
event. It feels wonderful to have helped
make this event happen to bring people together and get them thinking in new
ways.
By Kat Smith
Knowledge Exchange Operations Officer, B-Enterprising Team